But eighteen years earlier, in the school year of 1963-64. This is baloney! Whoever says such statements is wrong. I think that when it comes to the details of my own life My own word should be trusted over that of some random reader, Thank you! v. Unfortunately, because of this business About when we did or didn't move to the new junior-high building, Natalie Portman's suspicions somehow were raised, And she had a completely unnecessary "background check" run on me, And then left me for Shia LaBeout: Who is hot right now. VI. This poem is becoming a disaster. It happens sometimes- I get into a poem, and the thing goes haywire, And I don't know how to get out. According to some nitpicker at the Ohio Department of Education, Mrs. Roberta Erwin retired and left teaching entirely in 1967, Two years before my birth. Thus, the argument goes, She could not have taught me fifth grade, As I claimed in Canto III. VII. Look, I am turning forty, all right? Let's just leave it at that. Critics and people in the media who would ruin a celebration with this kind of"gotchà' behavior make me sick. If you still doubt me, Please be assured that this magazine has a rigorous policy of fact checking, And all the information in this poem has been checked, And directly verified with me. VIII. Well, it's going to be great being forty. I am looking forward to it. There are plenty of other beautiful actresses around; I may also try out for the forty-and-over division On the National Professional Rodeo Association tour. Recently someone asked me if I remembered when the name Of Idle wild Airport in New York City Was changed to ].F.K. International. "Of course not," I replied. "That was long before my time. Back then I had not even been born." -Ian Frazier spects, the victims of a structural imper- ative reaching back to the waning days of the Second World War. The Great De- pression in Britain, he said, started in the late nineteen-twenties, owing to struc- tural deficits in the nation's balance of payments, a reswt of the pound sterling's traditional role as the world's reserve cur- rency. Bretton Woods, the global eco- nomic conference in New Hampshire in 1944, replaced the pound with the dollar. This meant that debts tended to be denominated in dollars, and other na- tions had to hold dollars in reserve, to pay them off Not having dollars wowd expose your country to the risks of cur- rency fluctuations. And so other coun- tries coveted dollars. To get them, they sold goods. There was, therefore, in the Bretton Woods arrangement, a struc- tural demand for current-account sur- pluses, and for someone to eat up all those surpluses. We had to be the con- sumer of last resort. 'We've been living beyond our means for the sake of the world," Greenwald told me. 'Where else wowd all that crap go?" Barclay Leib, a derivatives trader and hedge-fund consultant, told me that some years ago his son, who was five at the time, asked him what his job was. Leib thought about it for a moment, and then pointed down the street. ''You see that Toyota? Well, we pay the Japanese twenty-five thousand dollars for it. Dad- dy's job is to get the money back." As he told me, "The Japanese invest it here and make mistakes." He added, "Mrs. Wa- tanabe was then and still is groping for yield." They make, we take. And then we find ways to pay for it all. Our prime asset, over time, became our financial acumen. It represented an ever greater part of our economy, our political system, and our in- teraction with the world. 'What's our best export?" Leib said. "Scrap metal? No. Hedge-fund managers. Financial creativ- ity. We're good at it. We keep the cycle of . " money gOIng. This flawed arrangement may be near- ing its breaking point, thanks to our reck- less spending, expanding debt, and in- creasingly questionable creditworthiness. A few recent Treasury auctions went poorly, and China has floated the idea of an alternative global currency. I recently revisited Morris Bishop's THE NEW YORKER, MAY 18, 2009 53